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Further Reading

A New York federal judge has sided with a group of major broadcasters—including Twentieth Century Fox and the Public Broadcasting System—and shut down TV-over-the-Internet startup Aereo’s "Watch Now" system.

"The Supreme Court has concluded that Aereo performs publicly when it retransmits Plaintiffs' content live over the Internet and thus infringes Plaintiffs' copyrighted works," Judge Alison Nathan wrote in her 17-page opinion and order on Thursday.

"In light of this conclusion, Aereo cannot claim harm from its inability to continue infringing Plaintiffs' copyrights. In addition, in light of the fact that Plaintiffs have shown a likelihood of success on the merits rather than just sufficiently serious questions going to the merits, they need no longer show that the balance of hardships tips decidedly in their favor."

As Ars reported in June 2014, the tenacious firm was badly damaged after it lost before the Supreme Court case on a 6-3 vote. The Supreme Court said Aereo's strategy of using tiny antennas to push over-the-air TV though the Internet looked too much like a cable company to avoid paying copyright royalties.

Further Reading

But Aereo didn't give up, and ran with that ruling, arguing it should be allowed to pay the same retransmission rate that cable companies pay by law, which is around one percent of revenue. That strategy has already failed once, when a company called Ivi tried it a few years back. The Copyright Office has refused to license Aereo as a cable company until a court rules otherwise.

"Doing its best to turn lemons into lemonade, Aereo now seeks to capitalize on the Supreme Court's comparison of it to a [cable] TV system to argue that it is in fact a cable system that should be entitled to a compulsory license under Section 111," Judge Nathan added. "This argument is unavailing for a number of reasons."

The court ordered that Aereo be forbidden from "streaming, transmitting, retransmitting, or otherwise publicly performing any Copyrighted Program over the Internet (through websites such as aereo.com), or by means of any device or process throughout the United States of America, while the Copyrighted Programming is still being broadcast."

The company's time-shifting feature, though, will stay alive for the time being—but the plaintiffs are continuing to fight on that front as well.

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Cyrus Farivar
Cyrus is a Senior Tech Policy Reporter at Ars Technica, and is also a radio producer and author. His latest book, Habeas Data, about the legal cases over the last 50 years that have had an outsized impact on surveillance and privacy law in America, is out now from Melville House. He is based in Oakland, California. Emailcyrus.farivar@arstechnica.com//Twitter@cfarivar